Kaitlin Mattes

On a quiet stretch of Cape Cod Bay, Caroline Holloway has built a gentle, careful life out of the pieces left to her. Abandoned as a girl and taken in by Jane, the neighbor who became the only true family she ever had, Caroline learned young that the people you love can leave without warning. So she keeps her world small and tender. She restores old houses, gathers sea glass along the shore, and holds the people she trusts very close.

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Then a hurricane floods one of her rentals and leaves her sheltering a stranger who is nothing like the man she expected.

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For two weeks, the storm left them nowhere to go but toward each other. He sees the parts of Caroline she's spent years quietly tucking away, the grief and the guarded corners and the woman beneath them both, and little by little she begins to wonder if the safe life she's built has been keeping her from living one at all. But he was never meant to stay. And letting herself love him means risking the oldest wound she carries: being the one left behind.

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She isn't the first woman in this house to face that choice. Jane once loved and lost a man she never fully understood, and the truth of what became of him still waits, half a century later, to find its way home.

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The Quiet Between the Waves is a tender story about grief and second chances, about the homes and people who put us back together, and about the courage it takes to choose a life that feels true.